'It's the best book out there about Hibernate (and there are quite a few on the market right now), maybe even the best book about ORM in Java, in general.' -- Adrian Spinei, Real Life, beta version

Persistence -- the ability of data to outlive an instance of a program -- is central to modern applications. Hibernate, the most popular Java persistence tool, provides automatic and transparent object/relational mapping so it's a snap to work with SQL databases in Java applications. Hibernate conforms to the new EJB 3.0 and Java Persistence 1.0 standards.

Java Persistence with Hibernate explores Hibernate by developing an application that ties together hundreds of individual examples. You'll immediately dig into the rich programming model of Hibernate 3.2 and Java Persistence, working through queries, fetching strategies, caching, transactions, conversations, and more. You'll also appreciate the well-illustrated discussion of best practices in database design, object/relational mapping, and optimization techniques.

In this revised edition of Manning's bestselling Hibernate in Action, authors Christian Bauer and Gavin King -- the founder of the Hibernate project -- cover Hibernate 3.2 in detail along with the EJB 3.0 and Java Persistence 1.0 standards.

The book ends with detailed coverage of JBoss Seam, a revolutionary web application framework for Java EE that builds on EJB 3.0, JavaServer Faces, and Hibernate concepts.

About the AuthorsChristian Bauer is a member of the Hibernate developer team and a trainer, consultant, and product manager for Hibernate, EJB 3.0, and JBoss Seam at JBoss.

Gavin King, a lead developer at JBoss, is the founder of the Hibernate project, and a member of the EJB 3.0 (JSR 220) expert group. He also leads the Web Beans JSR 299, a standardization effort involving Hibernate concepts, JSF, and EJB 3.0.

Praise for the First Edition'2005 Best Java Book!'-- Java Developer's Journal

'Hibernate in Action is very useful as a starter guide for beginners as well as a reference for those who are experienced Hibernate developers...keeps you engaged from start to finish...the book was beyond my expectations...this book is the ultimate solution.'-- Javalobby.org, (second review, fall 2005)

'The ultimate guide to the Hibernate open source project. It provides in-depth information on architecture of Hibernate, configuring Hibernate and development using Hibernate...It also explains essential concepts like, object/relational mapping (ORM), persistence, caching, queries and describes how they are taken care with respect to Hibernate...written by the creators of Hibernate and they have made best effort to introduce and leverage hibernate. I recommend this book to everyone who is interested in getting familiar with Hibernate.'-- JavaReference.com

'Practical advice on introducing and integrating Hibernate.'-- SciTech Book News, December 2004

'This book is the first and only full tutorial, reference, and authoritative guide, and one of the most anticipated books of the year for Hibernate users.'-- Dr. Dobb's Journal

'Hibernate In Action has to be considered the definitive tome on Hibernate. As the authors are intimately involved with the project, the insight on Hibernate that they provide can't be easily duplicated. That said, the authors' own, often controversial, opinions on common design practices (DTOs for example) are sprinkled liberally throughout the text, and this may turn off some readers. Still, if your project is going to be using hibernate or is considering using Hibernate, this book is a must-have.'-- JavaRanch.com

'This book, then, comes strongly recommended, because a contemporary and state-of-the-art topic is very well explained, and especially, because the voices are literally from the horses' mouths.'-- C Vu, the Journal of the ACCU

'Having used Hibernate for about a year before any book was available, I relied mainly on the documentation available at the web site. But this book from none others than the lead developer and the lead documenter is a great introduction and reference documentation to using Hibernate. The book is organized in such a way that the concepts are explained in progressive order from very simple to more complex, and the authors take good care of explaining every detail with good examples, but most importantly with the reasoning behind what the problem are we are trying to solve and why Hibernate chose to implement the solution in this or that way.

'The book not only gets you up to speed with Hibernate and its features (which the documentation does quite well). It also introduces you to the right way of developing and tuning an industrial-quality Hibernate application.'-- Slashdot.org

'A compact (408 pages), focused, no nonsense read and an essential resource for anyone venturing into the ORM landscape. The first three chapters of this book alone are indespensible for developers that want to quickly build an application leveraging Hibernate, but more importantly really want to understand Hibernate concepts, framework, methodology and the reasons that shaped the framework design. The remaining chapters continue the comprehensive overview of Hibernate that include how to map to and persist objects, inheritance, transactions, concurrency, caching, retrieving objects efficiently using HQL, configuring Hibernate for managed and unmanaged environments, and the Hibernate Toolset that can be leveraged for several different development scenarios.'-- Columbia Java Users Group

'Hibernate In Action is an effective user's manual for the open-source Java tool of Hibernate, which has exploded in popularity due to its automation of a tedious task: persisting Java objects to a relational database, a task made laborious by the necessity of having to write code that maps one's object-oriented code to a relational database or vice-versa. Hibernate In Action explains the basic workings of Hibernate with examples, detailed instructions for using it, how to deal with concurrency and transactions, efficiently retrieving objects, caching, and much more. Diagrams and sample code further elucidate this no-nonsense, easy-to-follow guide highly recommended for anyone tapping into the streamlined power of Hibernate.'-- Midwest Book Review

'Not only gets you up to speed with Hibernate and its features...It also introduces you to the right way of developing and tuning an industrial-quality Hibernate application....albeit very technical, it reads astonishingly easy...unfortunately very rare nowadays...[an] excellent piece of work...'-- JavaLobby.com

'The authors show their knowledge of relational databases and the paradigm of mapping this world with the object-oriented world of Java. This is why the book is so good at explaining Hibernate in the context of solving or providing a solution to the very complex problem of object/relational mapping.

There are other books that came out around the same time as this book and others that are coming in the following months, but this book is a very complete introduction to using Hibernate and its architecture and will become an essential reading for all developers interested in learning Hibernate.'-- Denver JUG

'Well worth the cost...While the on-line documentation is good, (Mr. Bauer, one of the authors is in charge of the on-line documentation) the book is better. It begins with a description of what you are trying to do (often left out in computer books) and leads you on in a consistent manner through the entire Hibernate system. Excellent Book!'-- Books-on-Line